Making Sense with Sam Harris - #55 — Islamism vs Secularism

Episode Date: December 6, 2016

Sam Harris speaks with Shadi Hamid about the power of religious belief, the failure of the Left, Islamist democracy, free speech, profiling, white nationalism, Obama’s foreign policy and other topics. If the Making Sense podcast logo in your player is BLACK, you can SUBSCRIBE to gain access to all full-length episodes at samharris.org/subscribe.

Thank you. of the Making Sense podcast, you'll need to subscribe at SamHarris.org. There you'll find our private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcatcher, along with other subscriber-only content. We don't run ads on the podcast, and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one. Today I speak with Shadi Hamid. Shadi is a senior fellow at Brookings, and he's a contributing writer for The Atlantic,

and he's published widely in other journals. Most recently, he's written a wonderful book entitled Islamic Exceptionalism, How the Struggle Over Islam is Reshaping the World. And I highly recommend that. And we get into all of these issues. His analysis, as you'll hear, doesn't totally align with mine or with Majid Nawaz's. So it was interesting. And I've been wanting to get Shadi on the podcast for a

while because he really is a novel voice in this area, a real political scientist who doesn't make the usual political science noises on the topic, especially on the role that religion plays in inspiring human violence. So without further preamble, I give you Shadi Hamid. So I'm here with Shadi Hamid. Shadi, thanks for coming on the podcast. Hi, Sam. Thanks for having me. Tell our listeners a little bit about your background and the kind of work you've been doing. a little bit about your background and the kind of work you've been doing. Yeah, sure. So I'm currently I'm a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. I work on Islamist movements and more broadly, the role of Islam in politics. And I'm born and raised in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania.

My parents, my parents came from Egypt in the 1970s. I mean, there's a lot more to say about how I sort of came to do what I do. But I guess two of the crucial moments for me were 9-11 and then the Iraq war. So I went, you know, before 9-11, I probably, I think I did actually want to just be an investment banker or something normal like that. 9-11 happens, and that sort of sets me along the path that has led me really to where I am right now. Nice. And you have this really illuminating book, Islamic Exceptionalism, How the Struggle Over Islam is Reshaping the World, which we will get into. Is this your first book, or do you have a book before this?

It's my second. My previous book, which came out in 2014, it's called Temptations of Power. And it's more focused on Islamist movements before and after the Arab Spring and their evolution. Before we get into the book, how would you describe yourself politically and religiously at this point? So I consider myself on the left, on the liberal left. And, you know, I'm, as you can probably guess, I wasn't a Donald Trump supporter, and probably won't be anytime soon. I consider myself, I self-define as a Muslim, as an American Muslim. And that's, you know, part of my identity. And although I think I write more as a analyst or a political scientist who happens to be Muslim, but I think as of late, because events in the Middle East and in the U.S. with the rise of someone like Donald Trump,

some of my work, I think, has become more personal. And I think I've become more comfortable, you know, speaking as not just an analyst, but as an American Muslim who is directly affected by some of the proposals that are out there on things like, you know, a Muslim registry, for example. So I think more of that personal side has come out in my work. And there's actually more of that in the new book compared to, say, the previous one. I don't know how familiar you are with my work in general or what I've said about Islam in particular. You certainly won't find a friend of Donald Trump in me. That's good to hear. Yeah, I know. And I know you're aware, I know you've noticed my happy meeting with Ben Affleck because you mentioned it in the book.

I expect we'll disagree about a few things, but I want to start on a point where we really fully agree. And that's the link between sincere religious belief and behavior. And I actually want to read a passage from your book because it was such a relief to read this. In a September 2014 statement, the Islamic State spokesman Abu Musab al-Adnani expounded on the group's inherent advantages. Quote, being killed is a victory, he said. You fight a people who can never be defeated. They either End quote. Now this is back to you. In this sense, religion matters, and it matters a great deal. As individuals, most, although not necessarily all, Islamic State fighters on the front line

are not only willing to die in a blaze of religious ecstasy, they welcome it. It doesn't particularly matter if this sounds absurd to us. It's what they believe. But this basic point about intention and motivation applies not only to extremist groups, but to mainstream Islamist movements like the Muslim Brotherhood that, in stark contrast to the Islamic State, contest elections and work within the democratic process. As one Brotherhood official would often remind me, many join the movement so they can, quote, get into heaven. Discussing his own reasons for joining, he told me, quote, I was far from religion and this was unsettling. Islamists resolved it for me, end quote. There's a few more words from you here. We might be tempted to dismiss such

pronouncements as irrational bouts of fancy, but if you look at it another way, what could be more rational than wanting eternal salvation? It would be a mistake then to view Islamist groups as traditional political parties. I guess I can stop there. It is such a relief to see someone talking honestly about this. And I want to talk about the reasons why people become obscurantists on this point. But I mean, are you aware of the novelty here of seeing someone like yourself, both for two reasons, both having an academic background as a political scientist and being a Muslim, to see people in either of those camps calling a spade a spade here is a deeply novel phenomenon. Well, I think it's sort of sad to me

that it's novel. I don't think it should be. But look, there's a lot of discomfort in talking about religion. And I see that especially with my colleagues on the left, who I think are very well-intentioned and well-meaning. And I have to say that when I heard Ben Affleck on that now famous program with you and Bill Maher, my initial reaction was to cheer him on. I was happy that here's someone, a famous actor and director, who's actually defending Muslims on national TV. That doesn't happen so often, right? But then when I thought a little bit more about what he was saying, happen so often. Right. But then when I thought a little bit more about what he was saying,

I could realize that this is actually a pretty vacuous statement. So he pretty much said, you know, Muslims are just like us. They want to raise their kids. They and the part that sort of amused me, which I mentioned in the book, is and they want to eat sandwiches, too, as if you as if, you know, wanting to eat sandwiches and wanting to implement Islamic law are two things that can go together. I know people who do eat sandwiches, but also believe in the implementation of Sharia. So I think but I have to say that I've changed myself over time. But I have to say that I've changed myself over time. So if you had talked to me, I think, six or seven years ago, I would have, I think, focused less on religion as a kind of contributing factor. But after spending so much time in the Middle East and spending hundreds of hours really talking to Islamist members and leaders and really trying to get to know them on a personal level and immersing myself in their world, it started to become more and more clear that religion

matters more than I think a lot of us are comfortable admitting. And I think this statement you just quoted from the Brotherhood official, it's really stuck with me. I think he probably told me that, yeah, that was pre-Arab Spring. And it stays with me now because when I think about my own graduate work in political science seminars, we never talked about paradise. And we don't know how to talk about paradise because it's not tangible. We can't measure it. But so that's why I think, you know, we have to sort of bring religion back into the conversation,

but in a nuanced way, in a careful way. And I should also kind of offer a disclaimer here. And I think, you know, I mentioned this in the first chapter of the book. I'm I'm slightly uncomfortable with some of my own conclusions. And that's why I do think a lot about how to present the arguments of the book to a popular audience. Because when I started writing it, it was before the Trump moment. It was before anti-Muslim bigotry got as bad as it currently is. And I'm just, I want to be attuned to the risk that some could misuse my arguments for purposes that I'm not comfortable with. Yeah, yeah. Well, you and I both have that particular liability. So yeah, I want to be sensitive to that as well. I want to linger on this point of why people systematically discount the role of religion here because it strikes me as the first problem that we need to overcome. Until you can reason honestly about what's going on in our world and what is

actually motivating people who are hostile to the most basic values of civil society, there's just no way to even move forward with a plan about how to address this problem. We'll just see if we differ in the kinds of remedies we imagine are possible. But the first issue here is that, and that you discuss this a little bit in your book, most secular academics and journalists and otherwise smart people have no idea what it's like to really believe in God, much less in a paradise that awaits martyrs after death. So it seems to me that this leads to a very basic failure of empathy. I mean, they just doubt that anyone actually believes this stuff. And perversely, no demonstration of sincerity is sufficient. I mean, it is apparently insufficient for there to be an endless supply of suicide bombers,

for there to be an endless supply of people who are willing to get on video and talk about their expectation of paradise and then blow themselves up. That, as I've long lamented, I mean, now it's been 15 years that I've been talking about this, that is somehow rhetorically insufficient to establish somebody's sincere belief in paradise. What you have in social sciences generally, and just among non-religious people, or people who are religious in a very liberal and moderate sense that would be unrecognizable to most people in the Middle East, you have people assuming that everyone is motivated by rational concerns and that all rational concerns are at bottom terrestrial concerns. But one thing you point out, which is very important to distinguish,

is that if paradise exists, or if you really believe that paradise exists, trying to get there is perfectly rational. In fact, one could argue it's the only rational aim, right? Anything that happens in 70 years here can't be of much consequence when put on the balance against what's going to happen for eternity. So the dividing line isn't between reason and unreason necessarily here on this point. It's just if you buy into these beliefs, your rational priorities are by definition otherworldly. And that's, that is something that people who think everything at bottom must be economic or political, just fundamentally discount or overlook or otherwise deceive themselves about. Exactly. And I think that, you know, so I live in, in DC. I grew up outside of Philadelphia. I spent most of my time, at least in the U.S. and in major cities.

And it's so striking how few people are in those kinds of liberal elite circles, if you will, can really relate to the kind of it's not just to the role of religion. It's something almost beyond that. It's the everyday magic of religion for people who believe in it. And it's hard to describe, and this is why sometimes I struggle to describe it, because unless you're actually immersed in that world and spend time with people who understand the world in those terms, it can be hard to relate to. And I think that even if you spend time with Christian evangelicals, that will help in some ways. But, and this gets to, you know, one of the main arguments of my book, that Islam is fundamentally different than Christianity. So that will get you maybe halfway there or something. But Christianity isn't quite the same thing as Islam. And I almost feel sort of, I almost feel a little bit weird or foolish in saying that because it's kind of self-evident that different religions are different from each other. But even that, I think, can be controversial in some circles. But I think then the real challenge for those of us who come from a secular

background, who are born and raised in the West, is to kind of go outside of our comfort zone and make an extra effort to understand those who are coming from a different religious vantage point. The other thing that I would say is, even the way we're talking about this, and we can't help it because we have to use words, we have to use a certain vocabulary, even the way we distinguish between quote-unquote religion and quote-unquote politics is itself problematic in my view, because the two, at least from the standpoint of Muslim believers in, say, the Middle East, the two are endlessly intertwined. And that's something that I had to sort of come to understand a little bit more. So if you ask a member of, let's say, the Muslim Brotherhood, to give an example. Why are you doing what you're doing? Why are you participating in these parliamentary elections? Why are you going to this protest

against the Mubarak regime? Is it because of religious motivations or is it because of political motivations? That person will almost certainly struggle to make a clear distinction between the two, because in his or her own mind, the two cannot be separated the way that I think we as products of a post-Enlightenment society, we do that. We're comfortable doing that. And it's so implicit or even explicit in the way we talk about these things in the media, in public discourse in the U.S.. And so we need to differentiate it from other religions and perhaps Christianity in particular on a few points. But I want to linger with this fundamental lack of empathy or lack of understanding of just how deep and self-consistent and, on some level, rewarding a religious worldview is in this context. You were almost one of these people who couldn't get a handle on what was going on there. And I want to read another passage

in your book, which just struck me as just, again, novel for its insight into what is actually going on and the cognitive and imaginative work people outside of these cultures have to do in order to understand what's going on. So you say here, despite my best efforts, however, the one element I continue to struggle with is what might be called the willingness to die. If I had joined a protest in a not-so-democratic country, and the army was moving in with live fire, there would be little debate. I'd run for the hills. And that's why my time interviewing Brotherhood activists in Rabah, just days before the massacre took place, was at once fascinating and frightening. It forced me to at least try to transcend my own limitations as an analyst. And then you go on with a Brotherhood spokesman who told me that he was very much at peace,

he was ready to die, and I knew that he and so many others weren't just saying it, because many of them, more than 800, did in fact die. And then you go on to wonder about where this willingness to die comes from. This is a passage where, even to my eye, you fall, however subtly, into the trap of one who can't quite believe what he's hearing. And so you write, where does this willingness to die come from? One Brotherhood activist, now unable to return to Egypt, told me the story of an activist who was standing on the front lines when the military began dispersing the Rabah Sidon. A bullet grazed

his shoulder. Behind him, a young man fell to the ground. The man had been shot to death. The activist looked over to see what had happened and began to cry. He could have died a martyr. He knew the man behind him had gone to heaven in God's glory. This is what he longed for, and it had been denied him. Aspects of the story were, I assume, apocryphal, but the basic point is an important one. This wasn't politics in the normal sense of the word. Now, your assumption that the story was apocryphal, I don't know if there were other cues to suggest that, but there's no reason to think it was generically. I'm sure you've read Lawrence Wright's book, The Looming Tower.

Those stories of Al-Qaeda essentially doing the same thing, just weeping tears of envy over their fallen comrades in Afghanistan, and even taking absurd risks in an apparent attempt to get themselves martyred. Those stories are a dime a dozen. It's just a sincere belief in paradise gets you there in so far as you manage to embrace it. So, yeah, you're right. I do struggle with this still. So I guess one distinction I would make is that members of Al-Qaeda or ISIS, for that matter, they are more actively trying to die in a sense. So and and they're not just willing to die. They're also willing to kill, which is, you know, which is a difference as well. So when I'm talking about brotherhood activists in a in a primarily peaceful protest situation, these are not people who are necessarily going there to die. That's not their primary objective. Their primary objective was to try to get the new military government after the coup of 2013 to go back to the barracks and to

reinstate Mohammed Morsi, the elected Islamist president, back into office. So for them, there was a very tangible political goal. And I have no doubt that they thought, at least initially, that if they held out for long enough and they had large enough protests and sit-ins in various parts of the country, that this would put enough pressure on the military. So I think understanding how the political goals intertwine with the very real religious goals, which are mentioned in the passage, are still important. And, you know, I also people people want to retroactively make sense of something after the fact. So I can't be 100 percent sure of of what these one or two individuals were thinking in the exact moment. But I know it because I too do this

sometimes, that in retrospect, I invest certain acts with more meaning than they actually had at the time, because we all want to make our lives grander in a way. All of us are searching for a kind of epic meaning, for a kind of narrative arc to our own stories. So when this Brotherhood member is telling me this story after, either before the fact or after the fact, so I left Egypt two days before the massacre happened, and I talked to people afterwards, right? And they were trying to make sense of what happened. And they're trying to offer a narrative arc, not just to me,

but I think also to themselves, if that makes sense. I would certainly grant you that there is a significant distinction between the brotherhood and the kinds of people who would be likely to join it, and a group like Al-Qaeda or ISIS or any other classical jihadist group. And it's a distinction, as you know, that you put a lot of weight on, because you almost talk about the Brotherhood as the mainstream alternative to jihadism. Some version of this Islamism needs to be embraced, or at least accepted. And I think we will definitely get there, because that is a controversial and interesting point. But again, I just want to linger on the Western secular liberal doubt about this phenomenon, because I'm not even, I'm not sure you understand how delusional this skepticism is among academics and how deep it runs. So for instance, I noticed that you cite the work of the anthropologist Scott Atran at various points in your book. I can see why you would do that. He's certainly said

several useful things in this area. But he also has been a reliable obscurantist on this point. He and I once got into what almost amounted to a fight on a panel at the Salk Institute. This was about 10 years ago. And I just couldn't believe the kinds of things he was saying about the irrelevance of religious belief to the phenomenon of jihadist terrorism. He just was going to the mat for religion being a non-variable, right? Yeah. So at one point, we found ourselves in the men's room together,

and I just looked at him, and I said, Scott, you mean to tell me that nobody has ever blown himself up with the expectation of arriving in paradise? Is that what you actually think? And he said, yes, that's right. Nobody believes in paradise.

Full stop. Okay, so, Sam, I have to ask you, because I do actually remember very vividly reading that on your blog some time back. I remember actually tweeting it, I think. And I had to read it several times because I couldn't actually believe that Scott Etren, it's hard for me to believe that he would actually believe that. And I can't make sense of it. So if you have any insights into what he was trying to tell you, I mean, that would be interesting. Well, on some level, he was just trying to tell me to fuck off. I mean, the only exculpatory interpretation or the only interpretation that I can make of what he said, interpretation, or the only interpretation that I can make of what he said, which is compatible with his sanity, really, is that he was telling me to fuck off in terms he knew I would see as provocative,

and that it was not an honest statement of what he believes. But in fact, when you look at how he's attacked me for things I've said about Islam, and when you look at the points of debate we've had in public, it is in line with everything else he said. I mean, so he went on at the SOC conference to say that the best predictor of whether someone was going to join a jihadist cell was not their religious beliefs or any prior indoctrination, but whether they were a member of a soccer team, right? So his thesis is that it's affiliation among, quote, fictive kin, you know, young men who bond and care about the esteem with which their co-evils hold them. And that's what gets you to, you know, push the plunger on your suicide vest.

Now, I don't need to spend a lot of time on Atran here, but I've pointed out previously all the moves he makes to discount the very obvious emergence of religion as a variable, even within his own data. Even when he's got jihadists telling him about God, he manages to ignore all that. But yeah, no, he clearly thinks, and there are other people like this, I just mentioned him just because I saw him in your book, he clearly thinks that this is a matter of the quasi-terrestrial concern of caring about your reputation among your friends. And I would never discount that as an important variable in conflict or in war. I mean, it obviously is. It's something that could get a totally secular or atheist person to sacrifice his life in combat, you know, in defense of his fellow soldiers. I mean, this is very ordinary psychological motivation that can lead to heroic self-sacrifice. But if you are

going to deny that the doctrine of Islam is in any way relevant to the phenomenon of jihadism, then it's just God's own miracle that we're seeing more Muslims than Amish or Anglicans blow themselves up in these kinds of conflicts, right? It makes no sense. Or, you know, the cartoon controversy. Why isn't the Book of Mormon leading to the headings in Times Square after it gets staged if every religious ideology was equally likely to produce these specific forms of intolerance? Yeah, exactly. But I think it's, in my effort to empathize, let's say, I agree with you that it seems really absurd to me that anyone could discount religion as an important variable.

But I also get where it's coming from in the sense that these are liberal academics who I think are generally well-intentioned. And I think they want to make Islam into something it's not. They want, or to put it a little bit differently, they want Muslims to be just like us, in quotation marks, us. And that's what Ben Affleck was trying to do as well, that we have become so uncomfortable with acknowledging difference, as if the fact that we could be different from each other is itself a problem. And that doesn't just apply to how we view practicing or conservative Muslims, but also how we even view Trump voters, this unwillingness to think that they are motivated by understandable or rational things. And instead, we dismiss them as a bunch of bigots, racists and deplorables. So in that sense,

I do see some parallels with this kind of liberal faith in universal values that are not, in fact, universally held and not just in the Middle East, but also increasingly, as we're seeing here in the U.S. or in Europe. And I think one of the main challenges going forward is how do we how do we come to terms with difference? Yeah, well, I'm going to want to defend universal values, but I think we should talk about Islamic exceptionalism and talk about difference first. But before that, I just want to talk about this obscurantism and the role it has played politically of late, because it's in large measure, and I've said this in the podcast, in large measure, this explains the rise of Trump, or at least this is one of several variables for me that, had it been different, wouldn't have given us Trump. The most troubling side of this, and this is the, we have this failure of empathy, we have secular people

who just don't get it. But then we also have Muslims who very likely do get it. I mean, I'm not saying they're closet Islamists or jihadists, but these are Muslims who actually understand Islam, who reliably lie about its tenets. So the fact that in the immediate aftermath of any terrorist atrocity, you will see someone from CARE jump on CNN and then just lie about Islam, talk about how there's no link between any of its doctrines and jihadism. Jihad is just an inner spiritual struggle, for instance. And then to immediately sound the bell of concern about Islamophobia, right? This word that, as far as I can tell, has been consciously engineered very cynically to prevent the very observations of a sort that you have made in your book and

that I've been making here, that there is a link between specific ideas, specific doctrines, and specific behaviors that, as we should, as I always remind people, victimize Muslims themselves more than anybody else. I mean, the most common victim of jihadist terrorism is a fellow Muslim who was standing close to the bomb when it went off, as terrorism is a fellow Muslim who was standing close to the bomb when it went off, right? It's not, you know, non-Muslims who are, for the most part, victims of theocracy and oppression and sectarian violence as we see it in the Muslim world. So it's this dishonesty. And again, this sort of touches close to home because I noticed, you know, Reza Aslan is one of your blurbists. I can't hold you responsible for who blurbs your book. But Reza, again, is someone who, honestly, I think he has probably never managed to speak

five sentences in succession about Islam without shading the truth or lying outright about it. I've been in debates with him. I've seen him in interviews, again, on CNN as a prime offender. And it's just guaranteed obscurantism. Now, he's either confused, which seems incredibly unlikely, given that he also can't go five minutes without emphasizing that he's a scholar of religion. But the list of this rogues gallery is quite long. You have Dahlia Mogahed.

You have all these people who are reasonably prominent, who will not speak honestly in the way that you have. I would take issue with the word lying and I and the idea that people are being dishonest. I don't I don't I don't have any sense that that Reza doesn't believe what he's saying. And the same goes for Dahlalia. I think I think the difference I can only speak for myself. The way that I approach it is perhaps a little bit different than, say, someone who's part of a Muslim civil rights organization. So after a terrorist attack, it's understandable to me that someone whose job if your job is to make Islam look good and to protect

the rights of the community, you want to disassociate between ISIS and Islam. I, however, because, you know, and I say this very, very straight up, I am an analyst. I have to be faithful to my findings, even if they make me uncomfortable. And it's not my job to make Islam look good. So I actually get this criticism from Muslim friends and family, and even sometimes my mom, she'll tell me, Shadi, you know, when you talk about ISIS, you should be a little bit more careful so people don't get the wrong idea. And we have this ongoing debate. And I totally get where she's coming from, because I know that she believes that ISIS is a total 100 percent distortion, perversion of Islam as she knows it. And for her, it's personal. It's her religion. Right. And I would say the same for myself as an American Muslim.

I do believe that ISIS's interpretation is a distorted interpretation of Islam as I understand it, right? So I don't, that's why I think that, and it's sort of my policy in general when I get in Twitter debates and any kinds of debate, I want to assume that people are not being dishonest and that there is a real or rational or reasonable motivation for them arguing the way that they do. And we just happen to disagree on this point. Let me just emphasize my agreement here. I think this principle of charity is incredibly important. I mean, it's the basis of any actual civil conversation about hard topics. So I totally take your point there. When I call out someone like Reza Aslan, I've seen him violate these norms and the expectation of honesty so often, both in public and in private. His capacity

for dishonesty is, again, as plain a fact of reality as any other you're going to find in human behavior. So I don't expect you've focused on him as much as I have. But there's a phenomenon of a reliable shading of the truth here. Again, it's not always conscious dishonesty. It could just be confirmation bias or just fear that, as you say, just be confirmation bias or just fear that, as you say, Muslims will be tarred broadly with the same brush. The fear is obviously that if we admit that there's any connection between the behavior of a group like ISIS and actual tenets of the mainstream religion of Islam, well then there's nothing to stop a slide into, quote, Islamophobia or, you know, more bigotry against Muslims. And we have a president of the United States who's

clearly operating under that assumption and who will never say anything honest about the link between religious ideology and jihad. And, you know, Hillary Clinton is, I mean, one of the reasons why I think her candidacy was so flawed was that she was the sort of candidate who in the immediate aftermath of the Orlando massacre, which took about 15 minutes to figure out that was an instance of jihadist violence, all she could speak about were our gun laws and sanctimoniously warn us about a rise in Islamophobia. So Donald Trump, as odious a character as he is, I would argue is one of his saving graces. And again, perhaps I'm unusually in touch with this because I've spoken so much about Islam that I have a fan base that insofar as there was a single issue voter out there who was just concerned about speaking honestly about this problem of jihadism and islamism i'm in touch with those people and i can tell you there are a lot of people out there including some muslims including my friend azra nomani that who you may know the journalist yeah who supported trump because of this issue

alone because he just stood up and said listen i, I don't understand Islam any better than you do, but there's clearly something going on here. And we have a president who's lying about it. Now, as big of a con man as Trump is, that statement taken on its own was a true breath of fresh air. Now, it's connected to a policy prescription that doesn't make a lot of sense and probably would cause immense harm, attempting not to let any Muslims into the country. But still, this is where political correctness has gotten us on this topic. And it remains a huge problem. My concern now with the rise of Trump is that because of everything that's wrong with the right-hand side of the political spectrum, we are going to witness a pendulum swing leftward, and there will be more dishonesty on this point

from the left rather than more honesty. And you'll have everyone doubling down on essentially lies about the motivations of jihadists. And I've been saying this for years and years, that if the only honest talk about jihad is coming from the right, you are going to push increasingly fearful people rightward, no matter how ugly the right is on every other topic. And we're witnessing this with the migrant crisis in Europe. We're witnessing it with, you know, I would argue with Trump in large measure. So like the Southern Poverty Law Center, right, which if ever we needed the Southern Poverty Law Center to occupy the moral high ground and to be sane and ethical and wise, we need

them now with a super empowered white nationalist movement in the U.S. for the first time in a generation. nationalist movement in the U.S. for the first time in a generation. And yet they just added Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Majid Nawaz to a list of so-called anti-Muslim extremists, right? So, you know, in addition to the KKK, we should worry about Majid Nawaz and Ayaan Hirsi Ali. It's complete insanity. And yet this is what the left has done to us on this topic. Well, that's why I think it's incredibly crucial right now for us to find the middle ground. And that's really what I'm trying to do with this book is there's got to be something in between the kind of political correctness of the left and what I consider to be

the very problematic approach of some on the right who want to make Islam into some kind of, Islam is the problem, or even Islamism is the problem, and to fail to make what I think are important distinctions. So I think there's something in between. And I realize that it's not a very popular place to be, which is why this book has pissed off people on both sides of the spectrum and kind of in between as well. But I feel like I want to do what I can to find that middle ground and encourage other people to search for it. And I'm not under any illusion that people are going to agree with the entirety of my argument. But I hope that we can at least start to have that conversation. I mean, because these issues will be an issue pretty much for the rest of our lives. We will be facing the scourge of terrorism and extremism for as long as

we live. I don't believe terrorism is something you can eliminate. It's something you can reduce to the best of your ability. But we're going to have to deal with a lot of this. And that's why we have to have this conversation sooner rather than later. Yeah. Well, so I want to talk to you ultimately about this very provocative comment that not only can't Islam be the problem, but perhaps Islamism can't even be the problem. And that's where you seem to take a slightly different path than I take or that, you know, my friend and colleague Majid Nawaz takes. We got to get there. But before we do, I want you to educate us a

little bit on a few points. And this goes to really the first principle of your thesis, that Islam is in some way exceptional. And so you say things like, for instance, there's nothing equivalent to Sharia in Christianity. Talk a little bit about that. Yeah, sure. Well, one thing I should just mention, which may be of interest, is that because of the political correctness around this topic, the book's title was actually going to be different until like the very last moment. What was it going to be? It's kind of a lame title. I mentioned it elsewhere so I can tell you, but we were going to call it the last caliphate, which sounds kind of poetic and

literary, but what the heck does it mean? I had an idea about what it meant, but ultimately I wanted the argument to be right there and I wanted to own it. I thought, look, I'm going, I'm spending a big part of my life writing this book. I can't hide away from my own argument. So let me own it, even though even the very notion of exceptionalism is going to anger a lot of people, especially in academia, where, oh my God, exceptionalism, Shadi is a neo-Orientalist or an essentialist, and I've gotten those charges. But anyway, the argument that I'm making, to put it, I guess, simply is that Islam is, in fact, exceptional. And but not just in any way, because I think it should go without saying that all religions are different from other religions in some way. But I'm arguing that Islam is exceptional in a specific set of ways that matter 14 centuries after its founding.

set of ways that matter 14 centuries after its founding. So specifically in its relationship to law, politics, and governance. And what that means in practice, but also in theory, is that Islam has proven to be resistant to secularization. And I would argue it will continue to be resistant to secularization for the foreseeable future for reasons that we can't easily dismiss. And we can talk about some of them. And the implications of that, I think, are important because what it does mean is that hopes for some kind of future reformation or some kind of linear trajectory where Islam goes through what Christianity did. So reformation, then enlightenment, then secularism towards the end of history of liberal democracy. I don't think that's a helpful way of looking at Islam, because why would Islam follow the same trajectory as Christianity if it's a different religion,

right? And this goes to your point about there being no equivalent of Sharia and Christianity, which is why I think it is very hard to talk about Sharia in America or Europe, because it's just really different and it's really complicated. And the closest equivalent, at least in Catholicism, complicated and the closest equivalent, at least in Catholicism, is canon law. But canon law, first of all, doesn't quite cover nearly as much as Islamic law does. But canon law is fundamentally about the internal organization of the Catholic Church and its sort of immediate surroundings. It's about managing a hierarchy. It's about it's about church building more than state building. And that's even the case in the medieval era, where there was this clear, maybe at least clear in theory, distinction between civil law and ecclesial law. So there is a kind of inherent dualism,

I would argue, in the Christian tradition, not just today, but going back many centuries. Well, it also just falls right out of the line in Matthew, render unto Caesar those things that are Caesar's, and unto God those things that are God's. Exactly. And even if you look at, you know, parts of the New Testament, where Paul says, you know, Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us. So even the attitude towards law, there isn't much public law in the New Testament. And the reason for that, I think, is actually, you know, I don't want to say it's 100% clear, but one of the main reasons is that Jesus was a dissident against a reigning state. So he never had to contend with governance. So naturally, the New Testament is not going to talk a lot about that, because that's not what

the early Christians were dealing with at the founding moment of the religion. And this gets me to another key distinction with Islam is that, hey, let's be honest about it. I mean, Prophet Muhammad was not just a dissident. He was actually and he wasn't just a prophet or a religious figure, but he was also a politician. And he was specifically and this is in some ways even more important. He was a head of state. state. So naturally, if you're a believer, right, and if something is coming from God as revelation, then naturally the Quran is going to have to have something to say about law and governance, if that's what the early Muslims are dealing with. Otherwise, how would Prophet Muhammad be guided, right? But putting that aside, even if we're just approaching it from a purely analytical

or academic perspective as outsiders, we would also say that any book has to address the needs of the time. So if we all can agree that Prophet Muhammad and the early Muslims were dealing with these questions of state building, then the Quran naturally will have more to say about such issues. Yeah. And one of the problems, obviously, is that once you accept the principle of revelation, once you accept the fact that this book is not merely the product of its time, but the product of God's omniscience, well, then its edicts need to stand for all time. So they constrain the politics. If there are political edicts in. So they constrain the politics. If there are political edicts in there, they constrain the politics of this and any future time. And that's certainly

perhaps not the only possible reading, but it's a natural one. And it's the reading many people attempt to take in every revealed religion. And following kind of directly on that point, what's the significance of the Quran being the actual speech of God? Can you make that? Because many Christians believe the measure of being a fundamentalist Christian is if you believe that the Bible is perfect in all its parts and the actual word of God, but that's still not quite the same thing as the Quran being the actual speech of God. And many people, I think even most fundamentalist Christians who don't doubt that Salafists or truly traditional Muslims believe every word of their holy book, even our own fundamentalists don't understand that you can

go one better and believe that the holy book has itself a kind of magical status. Yeah, so this was actually one of the fascinating aspects of writing this book, and there's nearly an entire chapter on the evolution of Christianity and its attitudes towards politics. So I really had to dive into Christian theology and talk to pastors and scholars and theologians and do my best to relate to a tradition that is in some ways foreign to me. Again, like growing up in the Northeast, you don't, I didn't have a lot of friends who took the Bible that seriously. So, you know, this and so it really it really struck me in my research what an important difference this was. So if you talk to far right evangelicals today, they will say that the Bible is the word of God. Muslims will also tell you that the Quran is the word of God, but they go one step further and they say that the Quran is God's actual speech.

And this is not some side thing or some incidental part of the religion, but it's actually a creedal requirement of the religion. So similar to how Christianity loses theological content or meaning if you take Christ out of it. So if you say that Christ is some ordinary guy, then you can, fine, that's fine. You can be nominally Christian or culturally Christian, but there's not a lot of theological content there because Christ is pretty central to Christianity. So similarly, and the Quran being God's actual speech is central, and what that means is that it's not just inspired by God, it's not preserved or protected by God only, but it's every word and letter is directly from God. So it's his speech in the quite literal sense of being his speech. So in other words, there's no human, there's no human role or human authorship. So Muhammad didn't write a certain part of the Quran.

On the other hand, even evangelicals will acknowledge because as a factual matter, it's true that various parts of the Bible have been written by different authors, including people like Paul, who I mentioned earlier. But evangelicals would say that it's still, in a sense, the word of God and it's protected by God. And it's in that sense free from falsehood. that the Bible or the New Testament, let's say more specifically, is directly from God in the way that Muslims would say the same about the Quran. If I'm not mistaken, the only part of the Bible that God can be said to have written are the two variant Ten Commandments. He etched those into stone, apparently, but those have a different status than everything else in the book. Exactly. And in the New Testament, there are obviously places

where Jesus is quoted. So in that sense, those parts of the New Testament, which aren't a huge part of it, are divine speech in a sense, but most of the New Testament is not directly Jesus' words or God's words or whatever exactly. Yeah. So this leads to, for among other reasons, to the problem that there hasn't been the same kind of textual analysis of the Quran academically that you have had of the Bible for now probably at least 200 years, subjecting the Quran to the normal critical treatment that one sees in the ivory tower has really been either forbidden or anathematized traditionally. I remember my foundation in part sponsored a conference in Germany that was, you know,

for the first time in anyone's memory, subjecting the Quran to very ordinary kinds of hermeneutics and linguistic analysis that the Bible has been subjected to for two centuries. And this was actually obviously a risky thing to do. I mean, most of the scholars publishing this work were working under pseudonyms, and it's just a completely paranoid exercise in very ordinary academic behavior. Can you say anything about that, about what hasn't been done to the Quran that could or should have happened? So I think that what was done with the Bible can't really be done with the Quran in the sense that there this is not just an issue of evangelicals today. But, you know, as I as I say in the book, I mean, there's there has never been a major sector denomination within Christianity that has argued that the New Testament is God's actual speech, right? So there has always been a readiness to have more of a critical engagement with the integrity of the text because most people can agree, even Christians, that most of the Bible was written by men.

Um, now you just will not. So if you want to bring, if you want to bring Muslims on board and get, um, you can well, hey, you know, there has to be a critical engagement with the text that even starts to dismantle some of the things that are dear to the vast majority, if not all believing Muslims, then, you know, it's a non-starter. And I just don't know. So even if you believe that or other people believe that, how productive is that? There was a time, I should point out, that the Catholic Church attempted to quash this. I mean, there was a movement under the Catholic Church called modernism, where scholars were encouraged to look closely at the Bible using all the modern tools and put it on as firm a scholarly footing as they could. And they quickly found that this had the effect of eroding rather than bolstering their faith

because they were finding errors or inconsistencies or just learning more about the process of inclusion or rejection of various texts. It revealed that whole generations of Christians had lived with certain books being canonical, which are no longer thought to be canonical, and vice versa. So it was just this carnival of errors and merely all too human efforts to put together a tradition that they exposed. And so the Catholic Church tried to stop it at a certain point. But I don't know if you remember that story that came now again, something like 10, 15 years ago, where this scholar who I believe still goes by the pseudonym, I think it's Christopher Luxembourg.

Oh, right. Yes. Yeah. He found that there was a passage in the Quran relating to the virgins that martyrs and other lucky people are supposedly going to get in paradise, that the word for virgin, excuse my non-existent Arabic here, but I think it's Hur or Hurri, actually meant at the time, based on textual analysis, white raisins, which were supposedly a delicacy. So rather than getting, there were a lot of jokes, you know, among which I told at the time, rather than getting 72 virgins, you get a fistful of raisins when you get to paradise. But that's, again, this is a scholar of Middle Eastern languages forced to live under a pseudonym and publish obscurely or not publish at all for analyzing the text. one finds when one analyzes texts in these ways is that because these books are almost certainly the product of merely human speech, you find evidence of that fact. And you find that parts

of the Quran are actually swiped from pre-existing literature and all the rest. And there is something in principle seditious and destabilizing about that. But why is it that you close the door to the possibility of that project ever working the same magic it worked on Christianity? Well, so I should say that, I mean, most Muslims aren't literalists in how they engage with the text. So I don't really see that as the, I don't think the primary problem within Islam and among Muslims is that the vast majority of Muslims pick up the Koran and subscribe to a very literalist reading. So one way of putting it is that Muslims take the Koran as God's literal speech, but they don't necessarily interpret that speech literally, if that makes sense. And actually, so I was, I was brushing up on my, uh, my copy of your book with Majid, I'm Islam and the Future of Tolerance. And, um, and I was reminded that there are,

there were parts where I was like, huh, um, Majid and I, you know, we, we have friendly disagreements, but we definitely do disagree on a number of issues. But as I was kind of going back, I was like, huh, I like how Majid is putting it here. So he has he has a section where he talks about the method of interpreting the text and the importance of Muslims acknowledging that there is no one true reading of the text. And I think that's important that none of us as fallible human beings have access to God's will. We don't know what God really wanted when he, you know, in certain verses of the Quran, right? So we can try our best to divine his intent or will, and there's actually a whole classical and academic literature on how to do that kind of interpretation, which is very rich and diverse and complex, but there's no way to know for sure.

So I think there is already quite a bit of room to operate. And just to give one example that comes up a lot for understandable reasons, the hadood punishments. So the religiously derived criminal punishments. And I should offer the disclaimer Sharia is just about cutting people's hands off. But they are there. Right. You know, and let's not pretend that they aren't. So there there are progressive interpretations. And I think Majid would probably subscribe to these that. And we have to be honest, too, in and say that this is a minority interpretation. So what I what I'm about to tell you now, the majority of scholars would not agree with me. But, you know, that the Koran, the Koran was revealed in a particular time and place in seventh century Arabia. So there were different norms and values then. So something like cutting off the hands of thieves did not offend the sensibilities of people at that time.

is to have a deterrent effect. So the goal is to stop people from stealing. And that was an effective way of doing that back then. But today we live in a different era. And if we want to achieve a similar deterrent effect, there's other ways to do that besides chopping people's hands off, right? I would argue there's probably no better way. I mean, it still would have, it would have a marvelous deterrent effect still. And if God's goal is to deter theft, well then, you know, why not keep chopping? You can see how what's unstable about that kind of pirouette

and why it can easily fall back to the more straightforward and seemingly honest reading of the text, which is, if it was good enough for God in the 7th century, it's good enough for God today, and God in his wisdom would have put it differently if he meant it differently. What you're basically saying, and again, obviously you know I love Majid, and I certainly hope the project of reconstruing everything offensive in the tradition succeeds. But the reason why this is an asymmetric battlefield is that the straightforward, literal, and

good-for-all-time interpretation is always available to the person who wants to pick up the book and say, well, listen, you know, what I'm hearing from Majid and Shadi and all these other overeducated Muslims is that they know better than what God literally said. They know what God meant more than God did. No, okay, but I don't think that I do. So I'll say this. I don't know if I'm right. And that's why I don't. So, you know, sometimes people basically ask me for fatwas. I'm not a theologian. I'm not in any position to tell people what God may have or may not have meant with certain verses. This is just my, this is just me speaking as a citizen, as a person, right? As an individual. And I'm willing to entertain the possibility that I'm wrong. And God does in fact want people in this world to cut off the hands of thieves. I don't, I, I don't like that idea. It makes me uncomfortable. And I also have,

I also, not to get into them, have somewhat complex views on the nature of justice and something that you and Majid actually get into in your book as well, which is this question of the created versus the uncreated Quran. I don't want to get into all of that, but I'm someone who would like to think that God, that God, God is not going to commit injustice. God is incapable of being unjust because he is supposed to be the most just. So I consider certain things like, for example, I consider certain things like, for example, like husbands, I don't know, marital rape, to give one example, or husbands beating up their wives over a disagreement. I'm not comfortable believing in a God that is okay with domestic abuse, because that would undermine one of God's qualities, which is being the bearer of justice. Obviously, I can see the ethical wisdom in wanting to parse it that way. But again, it's

open to the eternal quibble, which is, you're talking about an omniscient author here. If he wanted to say it more clearly, he could have, right? And he's perfectly clear on apostasy being a bad thing. Now, he doesn't spell out the penalty for it in the Quran, as you know. We need the hadith for that. But he's absolutely clear that this is not good and that you should fear and revile and in no ways befriend atheists and apostates and blasphemers and anyone who would doubt the perfect veracity of this book. And that's a problem. It's a social problem. It's a civilizational problem. It's a problem we have to figure out how to overcome. And so, you know, interfaith dialogue and finding some way to moderate that kind of sectarianism, you know, that's all progress in the 21st century sense. But it's just very easy to see how that will keep falling back to the more straightforward interpretation, which is, no, no, it's clear

here on virtually every page that God hates infidels, right? And he's prepared a hell for them to go to. It's the whole point. It's the whole point of this universe is to figure out how to get infidels into hell, right? If God had wanted to guide them, he would have, right? And so he's, in any sane ethical view, this is a totally perverse psychological experiment. You know, you put, imagine putting stupid people into giving them a puzzle they can't solve, right? Making it just too hard for them to solve, giving them no help at all. In fact, giving them further reasons to be confused about the right solution and then punishing them with an eternity in fire

for failing to solve the puzzle you made that was too hard for them. That's essentially the universe we live in if you're a Muslim or, you know, arguably if you're a Christian as well. And so that's, from the point of view of a non-believer, the whole thing is absurd. But more consequentially and more relevantly to this discussion, it seems that the fundamentalist, for lack of a better word, always has the advantage of saying, listen, just read the book and honestly grapple with what it says here and absorb the fact that God had infinite freedom to put it any way he wanted. If he wanted to tell you the universe was billions of years old, he could have told you that. If he wanted to tell you about the importance of learning mathematics, he could have told you that. But no, he's told you to treat women like property,

right? Or continue the practice of slavery under these, you know, more refined conditions or whatever it is. That's a problem. That's why the Islamic State really is the crystalline version of the retort to any kind of modernizing efforts. Sorry, guys, we're going to show you what the project actually looks like and just tell us where we're mistaken. But if the fundamentalist or literalist reading of scripture was the default setting, then the majority of Muslims today would be fundamentalists and they aren't. I think that's a false conclusion. It's understandable. But the truth is, is that most Muslims happily are human beings first. Insofar as they may believe in paradise, they're not sure of it, say. They're not committed to just seeing this world as a loathsome moment of temptation on the

way to a sublime eternity. They want a nice life in this world for understandable reasons. And so their commitment, either they're just not especially educated about what Islam is, but this is not just Muslims we're talking about, we're talking about religious people in general. This is true of Christians and Buddhists and Hindus and everyone else who's in thrall to some otherworldly belief system. To the degree that they find life in this world captivating, beautiful, worth maintaining, worth improving, they are captivated, and they have another commitment. And when they read God saying something that seems inimical to maximizing human flourishing, whether it's political or economic or intellectual or artistic or any other way, they decide to disregard God's crazy edict there

because it is incompatible with what they want out of life. And that's a good thing. And most, even Muslims, for the most part, have been captured by that modern, secular, humanist project. And that's the lever we have to keep pulling on some level. ideas from outside of scripture and then sort of retroactively Islamize them. And I know that you argue, you know, if I recall in parts of the moral landscape, or maybe it was at the end of faith, one of them, that some of the argument that you're making now, that to the extent that Muslims are pragmatic, it's because of things that are foreign to their faith. And it's because of the sort of indelible pull of secularization that they cannot avoid because they live in the real world. But I don't know why we have to see those things as outside of Islam or not falling within the realm of religion.

And that's why I think Islam has been quite flexible and resonant to this very day, despite a lot of challenges to it, is that it is able to bring those other things in. So someone can be fully modern and fully Muslim and not have to choose. Where I think if you look at Christianity at a crucial moment in the 19th century in particular, where people were essentially making a choice between being Christian and being modern, because the church was so avowedly against popular modern concepts like universal suffrage or democracy or socialism, where Islam has actually been quite nimble in this regard in being somewhat comfortable.

So that's why you have phrases that people use quite often, like Islamic democracy, Islamic socialism, Islamic finance. And I think that's key to understanding why Islam has been resistant to this kind of more aggressive secularization that would privatize Islam or to kind of put it in a box. Muslims have realized, I think, by and large, that they don't have to put Islam in a box to live in the modern world. Let's get to this, because this is drawing to the heart of your claim, which most people find provocative, which differentiates what you're doing or saying from what I certainly hear Majid saying. And this is that, for all practical purposes, Islamism is here to stay, and that's not necessarily a bad thing. I have a quote here from you where you say,

I don't think it's necessarily a bad thing for Islam to play an outsized role in public life. And you also say, quote, I see very little reason to think that secularism is going to win out in a war of ideas. This is a kind of skepticism about secularism. And that's coupled to something that you do seem to view as a kind of intrinsic good, which is democracy or the respect for democracy or the outcome of a democratic process. So that as long as the people tell you what they want and their wants are made effective at the level of government through the democratic process, it's not for us to say what they should want or to deny them what they want. And you seem to think that there's not

really a deep argument for secularism, but there is a deep argument for democracy. I want to talk about that a little bit because I see that the other way around. I don't see democracy to be an intrinsic good. If the people are imbeciles or religious maniacs, well, then you could argue they're not ready for democracy. Or democracy is suicidal. It could be suicidal. When I say that religion shouldn't play a role in public policy or government, what I mean is that dogmatism shouldn't play a role, and unreason shouldn't play a role, and the denial of science shouldn't play a role, and superstition or a belief in magic shouldn't play a role. And the denial of science shouldn't play a role, and superstition or a belief in magic

shouldn't play a role. And the reason why secularism, let's just take a core principle of secularism, which is at odds with much of what Muslims believe and certainly much of what Islamists believe, just a commitment to free speech and a commitment to freedom of thought, a commitment to free speech and a commitment to freedom of thought, which is really at the core. This is an intrinsic good for this reason. It is the only real error-correcting mechanism we've got intellectually and ethically moving forward. The moment you say that unpopular opinions or new opinions or startling opinions are not only unpopular, startling, new, and worthy of criticism, perhaps, but illegal. We're going to punish you for having them, right? We will kill you for your apostasy. We will kill you for the cartoon we didn't like, or the novel we didn't like, or the play you shouldn't have staged. The moment you make that move, you put a brick wall at the horizon of human conversation.

And there's really no telling how bad that could be in the limit. And the only way we can move forward morally and scientifically, and culturally really, is to have conversation be open. And that is fundamental in a way that democracy merely isn't. Yeah. So let's see a couple of things there. So I guess one thing that's worth mentioning that, so my own progressive views on certain issues. So I support gay marriage. I support decriminalization of marijuana, things that are associated with classical liberalism, let's say, and the left as well in the US. I guess I've sort of come to the conclusion that my arguments about those things would be compelling to me and people like me. I'm under

no illusion that they'll be compelling to a majority of Egyptians or Pakistanis or whatever. So I actually am willing to acknowledge that my views are not going to win out when it comes to Islam. And I have to be realistic about that. And so that's one thing I would say. Let me just get you to refine that or unpack that a little bit because half the time I hear you say it just doesn't make sense. If you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe at SamHarris.org.

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